Best Cities for Young Singles. Did We Make the List?

I perpetually “steal” from MSN Love & Dating because their stories are usually pretty good. Today they have a piece on the Best Cities for Young Singles, complete with a slide show of said cities. If you’re single in Albany, and this depresses you (I know many of you are, as I hear about it every day …), you may want to update that resume.

I am including a link to the story here. I am also reprinting a column I wrote last year about the state of dating in NYS and how Alaska is, apparently, the place to be if you’re a single female.

Charting love’s course by the numbers

Single women often complain about the lack of any good (single) men. Movies are based on it, and books are born from the conundrum. In Albany, whining women may be on to something. We’ve got 86.5 males to every 100 females ages 18 and older, according to the last census.

Not sure what’s happening with that half a person, but most women aren’t looking for a guy who is half anything. Half-baked, half-cocked, half-hearted not good.

Anyway, with odds like these, the likelihood of meeting an available man in Albany is about as good as finding a straight guy at a Cher show.

My one friend gripes at least once a week about this area. It’s so bad, she says, she’s looking for jobs elsewhere. After Internet dating, speed dating and, well, just dating, she sent me that stat to prove what she’s been saying all along is true.

She’s even looking outside the state. The last statistic she sent me was about Alaska where there are 114 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women, the highest ratio of men to women of all the states. But she’s wanted to move to Alaska, anyway, for work. This statistic, apparently, only makes it more desirable.

I don’t care if there were 100 single men to every woman and the most perfect job in journalism, nothing would get me to live in Alaska.

As one person said, “Yes, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

Exactly.

I think my friend’s on to something. I, too, have noticed a lack of Gen Yers around here. We’ve got more college students in a 30-mile radius than there are on the streets of New York City when Kanye West guest hosts MTV’s TRL. A trip to most any restaurant, park or grocery store shows the Capital Region is a place families put down roots. But when it comes to singles in that 25 to 35 age range, this area is not the place to be.

It’s so bad, that when we hit up a local sports bar for weekly team trivia, we find ourselves in a restaurant full of guys. Only problem: They’ve either yet to trade their flip-flops for dress shoes, or they’re middle-aged and ring-wearing.

The lack of this demographic became abundantly clear last week. I just got back from a vacation, where I visited friends and my sister, Cindy. In the three cities in which I spent any real time Fairfield, Conn.; Hoboken, N.J.; and New York City the population differences were quite evident.

My friend Laura and I went to a deli in Fairfield, then hit the beach. The deli teemed with young (seemingly single) professionals. The beach, too, would have been networking heaven for anyone of recent master’s degree or Ph.D age.

Hoboken was more of the same. My sister and I sat in pedicure chairs facing the window. “Look,” she said, nodding toward the window.

“What,” I asked.

“Those guys. That’s Hoboken. It’s crawling with people our age,” she said, in her constant bid to get me to move down there. That’s also her response every time I remark there are only two other people my age in my department at work or that the social scene around here, with the exception of Saratoga Springs in the summer, really lacks.

Perhaps she should move to the township of Paradise, Nev. It has the highest ratio in the country with 118 single men for every 100 single women. Talk about those odds. Almost as good as being a female student at RPI.

At least this isn’t Albany, Ga. It has the country’s lowest single male-female ratio with 71 men per 100 single women.